UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Eugene Cullen Kennedy on Apr. 24, 2012 Bulletins from the Human Side
The sound you hear all across Catholic America today is that of Rachel’s weeping again over the unnecessary and undeserved suffering that has been heaped by a righteous-sounding Cardinal William Levada, the pope’s man at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the women religious of this country.
This event is one of epic sadness because it symbolizes how an organized church undercuts the immense good it does at its best by doing near to its hypocritical worst in an attack as coordinated as a terrorist strike on the heroic women who deserve credit for building the church in America into the most successful realization of Catholicism in history.
Only ambitious men “making,” in the apt Italian phrase, “a career in the church” could have designed this bad-faith betrayal of the leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious who had arrived in Rome for a dialogue with Cardinal Levada only to learn that the news of the empowering of a panel of bishops to supervise them had already been sent to the American bishops for public distribution. …
Archbishop Sartain, who has just politicized his parishes by delegating them to gather signatures against legislation on same-sex marriage, according to the website Christian Child Abuse, played a still-unclarified role while bishop of Joliet, Ill., in ordaining as a priest a seminarian on whose computer gay porn with young boys had been found a few months before. This priest was convicted the next year of sexual assault of an underage boy. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, SNAP, observed: “Sartain, in our view, had a moral obligation to postpone the ordination, send [the priest] for treatment and inform the public.” SNAP president Dave Clohessy later said Sartain “did none of that.”
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